I don't have any pictures yet (no camera) but hopefully soon! On Saturday I was in town and made the mistake of going into Pets Paradise (similar to Petco or Petsmart in the USA). The one in the centre city had improved greatly the last few times I was there and I wanted to see if this one had.

Sadly, it hadn't. The bettas were in teeny tiny bowls with no lids. The caresheet said not to keep them below 18C, ignoring the fact that anything below 25C is actually too cold. They had five tiny females in a 4 litre tank. One was hiding on top of the filter, lying down, with clamped fins. I called one of the staff members over because it looked like she had fin rot. The staff member took her out and carried her across the room in a net and dumped her in a new bowl of water, not bothering to acclimatise her. I pointed out that she wouldn't recover without a heater, and the girl refused to put one in. She kept telling me "We'll see how she does in 24 hours, then maybe we'll add a heater". I couldn't see the point on not adding a heater straight off.

Anyway, I couldn't leave all those girls there, but I don't have room for more tanks and I didn't know how the sorority girls would take to too many new additions, so I just bought one. She is maybe an inch long, if that, deathly pale, stripy like you wouldn't believe and was being chased by the remaining three girls, all of whom looked bigger and healthier (and prettier, so I suspect they will get rehomed easily enough). This girl needed to be rescued, though, so I bought her from another staff member, having expressed my displeasure to the know-nothing shopgirl.

She settled into a 3 gallon quarantine tank with a 25 watt heater, a sponge filter, IAL, a couple of caves and some live plants very happily. She is so tiny that she looked like she has more room in that than Odysseus has in his 5 gallon. She's eating well and is very active, but her colour remains very poor. I've named her Circe. I'll be doing 50% water changes twice weekly.

I left her floating in the sorority tank for a while whilst I was setting up her tank, and she's less than half the size of my other girls. I do want to add her to the sorority eventually, but I'm not sure how much I should let her grow before I do. I'm quarantining her until Christmas because I do not even slightly trust the shop I bought her from, but I doubt she'll double in size by that time. I suspect putting her in whilst she is so small may even be a good thing - it's possible the big girls will mistake little Circe for one of the tetras and just leave her be. Plus I know she is quick enough to get out of the way and hide in the extremely dense foliage if they bother her. I might put some of her caves in (if I have room) so she can hide.

Pets Paradise is awful in its treatment of bettas. I have yet to find any that have employees with even a basic knowledge of fish. The lady actually had to tell me not to house males and females together as they had tried it in the past and it had resulted in fatalities. I shake my head thinking that these are who we are supposed to regard as the 'experts'.

The one near where I used to work keeps their females in the same 4 or so litre bowl. I have purchased a few ridiculously overpriced females from there simply because I felt bad for them. Several turned out to be young PK males, but the rest grew into very nice-looking girls once they were provided with clean water and good food.

However, Pets Paradise is not the only place to treat their female bettas poorly. At the otherwise nice LFS I sometimes go to, they have a tank full of blue and red VT females with huge open wounds and severely torn fins. I don't understand how they can openly show such a disregard for the health of their stock.

I'm lucky in that regard - most of the shops around here treat their bettas relatively well. All the males have at least a litre, veiltails are generally in community tanks and many of the more fancy tails have drip filtration systems with a heater in the sump (yay!). Females are usually kept in a larger tank, but Pets Paradise is just appalling in that regard. The one in the centre city was much better, but this one was just terrible. I wish I could have taken all the girls, even though my little shrimp of a female cost me $10.